


Cold Case

by Vehemently



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 15:47:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The woman Dean Winchester sleeps with every night. There is no woman</p><p>Set shortly after the events of season 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Case

He wakes up with someone's head on his chest. It's a distinctive sensation: the shape of ear and jaw, the tingly moisture of breath against his skin. There's an earring, so it's probably a girl. Dean Winchester has been dreaming about girls.

Muzzy, he struggles with where he is, what he's been doing, and who with. The dreams interfere, a girl with long yellow hair and a pert chin, walking down a rural road with a poppy behind her ear. He has been dreaming of her smile in the sun, how she is ordinary and innocent. She turns her head, hair flapping behind her, and he wakes in a dull dread over what can have happened to her.

He catches on to wakefulness and slowly remembers: they've been near the Great Divide, tiny figures dwarfed under Gannett Peak's shoulders, tramping through Sam Colt's graveyard trying to stop up the mouth of Hell. Dean lifts a hand to touch the woman resting on his chest, wondering exactly what kind of trouble he could have gotten into on the way across the stark high plains back to Bobby's yard. Sam's mumbling to himself on the other side of the room, so it can't have been that exciting a kind of trouble.

His hand comes down on his own ribs. There is no woman resting on his chest; there is no other body in bed with him. He isn't wearing a shirt, not even a corner of the sheet, just bare skin pebbling in the spring chill. And then he's up like a Jack-in-the-box, convulsive as if his back isn't still cranky with him after the mauling he took in Wyoming, and there's nothing that shouldn't be in the room.

Against the far wall, Sam's lying on his side with his feet hanging off the end of his bed. There's a hole in one of his socks. He's making a gesture with his hand that Dean can't see at this angle. He seems like he's reaching for something but all that's there is the wall and the wobbly panes of glass in the old window. The light's gone from outside, shadows long as the sun tracks over to the west side of Bobby's house. If they all hadn't been up the night through, they'd be sitting on the porch together prepping weapons, but as it is Bobby's probably done the gentlemanly thing and sacked out on the couch while Ellen takes his bed. Now the last of the old dogs is dead, Dean might be the only thing awake in the whole yard.

There is no woman. He touches the pendant around his neck. There is no woman.

Sam is alive, just a little straight scar down his back half-covered by the sheets he's tangled up in. The long muscles next to his spine tense while Dean is looking at them. "Baby?" he asks, one distinctive word in his mumbled dream-monologue.

"You're snoring. Roll over," Dean tells him, and Sam grunts and shifts till he's on his face. He's managed to mash both his hands under him, palms flat on his chest.

Dean turns away, faces the wall himself. It's covered with old wallpaper, a little puckered near the seams, faded gray-yellow. A pattern, something Bobby would never have chosen himself. Dean has no idea whether Bobby ever had a wife, or whether this is the house his mother raised him in. Or maybe the house belonged to a total stranger, some woman with the ambition to hang paper herself, some woman long dead or moved away.

Back down into sleep, Dean flashes again on that sunny blonde girl, and as he goes under he could swear he feels a hand on his waist.

***

"I dreamed about Jess," Sam says suddenly, around a mouthful of cereal. Bobby still keeps boxes of cereal for them as if they were kids. "I dreamed she was with me."

Dean is groggy and his bruises have stiffened. He can't remember the reason they're all awake now, in the evening, instead of sleeping the night through and starting afresh tomorrow. He pulls a coffee cup off the row of hooks over the sink and pours himself caffeine.

They are far out enough in the country for crickets, and a pair of them are limbering up for a concert as the twilight stretches into night. Bobby thumps at the door lintel lightly and they stop. There is a worn place, a big greasy fingerprint, where he must thump the wall all the time. The crickets wait a while before settling in again, and it is quiet, quiet, just the creak of a chair and Sam's crunching and the low murmur outside of Ellen talking into a phone. She has her back to the screen door, sitting on the porch step. She is wearing a ragged sweater and her hair is a whirlwind.

"I dreamed her knees banging into mine," Sam adds. "And her cold feet in the bed. She had the boniest knees," and he chuckles a little, shy. Bobby tips his chair so the two front feet hang in midair and considers Sam, a wistful look on his face.

"Maybe she can rest, now." Dean takes a swallow of coffee wrong and has to mask it, sinuses burning, to hear what Bobby says next: "Now her killer's gone."

Sam nods, a small hunched motion where he sits looming over his bowl of cereal. "Maybe she can." He smiles, the real thing this time, first time in a while. He takes another bite of cereal.

Here they are in Bobby's kitchen, the disused old-time faucet on the edge of the sink from when you drew well-water and maybe there wasn't any such thing as county services. The curtains in the window are threadbare, translucent, some red-on-white pattern faded to gray-on-gray, except down on the ends where they sit out of the sun. They are strung on saggy elastic, so you can pull them down and check what's going on in the yard. The wall behind the stove is marked with years of bacon and steaks.

There are enough coffee cups for an Elks meeting. The tiny twin beds upstairs are the same beds Sam and Dean slept in when they first came here, five and nine and unused to strangers. Dean doesn't know if anybody else's kids have taken a turn in those beds, crashing hard on the way from one problem to another, crying out to each other in the night. He drinks his coffee, but in his mouth it turns sour.

The screen door bangs, so hard it's startling, and Ellen catches it while it still shudders on its hinges. She stands on the mat with a phone in her hand, her mouth half frown and half uncontrolled grin. "She'd unearth my mother from the grave and teach her how to suck eggs," she swears, and that's how Dean can tell Jo is all right. Somewhere far away, hopefully, and on the alert for the hunt she has coming. Her mother puts down the phone on the counter and smoothes back her hair from her face and abruptly realizes she's in a kitchen with three men and her sweater falling open. Dean can see she isn't wearing a bra under her t-shirt.

Sam and Bobby are gentlemen. They blush in tandem and drop their heads to examine the table, while Ellen straightens up and captures the edges of that sweater. Dean pulls his head together and is ready for when she glances at him: he winks.

Her laughter is bright, shocking in that dingy kitchen. "Sweetie, you practice that, for next time I'm feeling old." She backhands him gently on the chest as she passes, on her way in to dress and get ready to leave. He wants to reach out and touch her, bury his face in her shoulder again, and doesn't. He watches her go, the busy purposefulness back in her stride, and finishes his coffee.

"You about ready?" he asks, and before he's shut his mouth Sam is on his feet, pacing over to the sink and pouring the last of his milk down the drain. He has his shoes on already, which is one up on Dean himself.

Bobby watches them with old eyes. Ellen will hook up with Jo, probably, and Bobby will be left alone again in this big rangy house, only the books for company. But that's the way it's always been, hellos and goodbyes and never stay-a-whiles. They have work to do.

"I guess in a couple weeks we should take stock, share out notes on what's worked and what hasn't." Dean crosses his arms and looks Bobby in the eye. "You ready for your place to turn into the Roadhouse Reborn?"

"I heard that," calls Ellen, from the next room. Bobby chuckles and lifts his cap to re-settle it on his head.

"Just make sure you come back," Bobby tells them, and he's still laughing, but it isn't a joke. Sam is nodding big, scared nods as Dean herds him back up the stairs to fetch their gear.

***

Dean blinks awake. There's hair under his chin, the ticklish fine hair on the top of somebody's head, and the stir of breath against his neck. He shivers, disoriented, still half in dream. The girl on the road, kicking stones into the grass, humming to herself, slim and agile. The ache-red of the poppy amid the mass of yellow hair. He stares at the anonymous ceiling, the walls hung with taxidermied fish. This isn't a woman's bedroom.

He works out clues to remember where he is. He's pretty sure it's Wisconsin, heading east after something horrible, but he can't remember what and he can't remember where they stopped. There must have been a waitress, a pretty waitress handing out cheeseburgers, but he can't separate out a recent memory. They all fade together, and _that's_ the disturbing part. He wraps an arm around this one, trying to imagine her skin color and the shape of her hips, and the only skin in his head is from the dream, sun-kissed. Carefully, he turns his head. Sam's there, on the other bed, splayed flat on his back with one hand trailing off the edge. He's gonna be pissed, come morning.

It's something they don't do, impose on each other like this. They're far enough apart in age that they've always kept things private. Dean can't imagine what this woman could have offered that he wouldn't have gotten a second room for.

Her grip is against his ribs, solid, conscious. The palms of her cold hands leave blank spots on his skin, as if she'd burned the nerves away. He lifts his head to get a look at her in the morning-after daylight, and there's nobody there.

There is no woman. His arm lapses to his own side, where a moment ago he'd felt someone else's flesh. There is no woman.

Dean blinks at the ceiling. On the other side of the room, Sam groans, a noise of loss. Dean grabs all the covers he'd kicked down off the end of the bed, and wraps them around himself as if it weren't May. He lies awake, watching Sam thrash and grumble, until the sun is properly up and he can pull himself together for the day.

Out of the shower, towelling his hair absently, Dean walks back into the bedroom to see Sam sitting there confused. He's got wrinkle marks on his cheeks, long funny red creases. Dean's working on how that old joke went about corduroy pillows and headlines, when he notices the owlish look Sam is giving him. "What?"

"Ngh. I thought you poured an ice bucket on me in the middle of the night."

Dean shrugs, innocent, although now he's imagined the idea he'll need to try it some time. He sits on the bed and casts around for clean socks.

"But the sheets are dry," Sam adds, rubbing his face. "I guess I dreamed it."

"I am a badass wherever I go," Dean reminds him, finger wagging. "Even in your dreams, I rule."

Sam rolls his eyes so hard he rolls over back onto the bed, and lies there for a minute as if he might go back to sleep. But they've got too much work to do, and Sam's up and in the shower by the time Dean has figured out which end of his t-shirt is up.

***

"How do we know who's who?"

They're digging. They know how to do that, it's something they know. They're good at doing it in the dark. Usually, when they're digging, it's to open a grave long closed, not to make a new one. The dirt is cloying and smells like rot. They're not very deep yet.

"Who's who what?" Dean asks absently, and takes the opportunity to rest on his shovel. Summer's heading into drought all east of here, but Ohio dirt is full of rain, sticky, steaming in the late night. Dean picks up his shovel again and drags it out of the mud and it makes a sound like sex.

"Well," Sam explains, "with this many demons unleashed on the planet. How will we know we got the one, and didn't accidentally let his partner go?" He chucks a shovel-ful onto the pile. His end of the grave is even, with square corners. Dean's end is a mess, but it's a little deeper, racing downward toward drier, crumblier soil. Neither of them glances toward the body.

It was supposed to be a simple exorcism, quick and dirty but nothing compared to doing it on an airplane. Taking a few knocks, okay, part of the job, same as giving a few. They sent that nasty-ass smoke back to the fissure it came from, and then when its host dropped dead -- an ugly mug made uglier with malice behind it -- they were as surprised as anyone. It's cooling now, in the trunk of the Impala, and the argument over whether to alert the authorities is long since cold.

Dean has not been thinking about demon tactics. Dean's been thinking math, these past couple of days. Two hundred demons, more or less. Four demons per state, or clusters of them east and west by population, or some of them staking huge land claims like cattle barons of old. No telling how demons think about territory, or if. It's not even clear whether they visit Canada sometimes. "You mean, like, a demon James Gang?"

Sam chuckles a little and there's that blanch across his face as his new bruises sting. "God, I hope not."

They dig in silence after that. Dean would really like something to talk about, other than demon bank-robberies, and can't think of anything. It's a relief to be able to stand up hip-deep in the new grave and say, "I think that'll do."

Sam agrees, or anyway he gives in without arguing. He hoists himself out of the hole and offers Dean a hand up. The shovels clatter against each other, a cold noise in the night. They're both sweaty, plucking their t-shirts away from their bodies. Dean opens up the trunk and they have a look.

The body isn't that big, about five-nine and flabby. T-shirt and jeans, nothing special about the sneakers, nothing that would have told you about the evil part till he showed his all-black eyes and laughed. Dark curly hair, broad face, big blunt hands: could be anybody. Could be a migrant farm worker or a mechanic or a cop on his day off. Dean rolls him over to get at the wallet and Sam lets out a low curse.

"Hold him still, I'm looking at the eyes."

"Dude, we exorcised him already. Leave off." Dean has the wallet in his hands, still a little body-warm and molded into a habitual shape.

"There's broken blood vessels in his eyes. I think it was when I connected with his head that did it."

"What? Oh bullshit." Dean shoulders in for a look. Sam holds the flashlight for him. "You get that when a guy drowns too, or when he's strangled. We don't know _what_ he was mixed up in before we stumbled over him. This isn't on you -- he could be dead six ways from Sunday."

Sam's only response is a morose shrug. Dean leaves him be and opens the wallet. There's a couple of credit cards in there, not platinum or anything, just normal cards. A health insurance card. A driver's license, Armando A. DiBiasi. Behind the driver's license, a snapshot of a couple of children. They smile at Dean, even clean teeth, wearing pajamas and bathrobes in front of a Christmas tree. There aren't any names written on the back.

Dean pockets the wallet and nudges at Sam. They've got work to finish, and the sky is graying in that sulky, foggy way that says it'll be a scorcher come daylight. Better to have Armando A. DiBiasi in the ground before he starts to stink.

They get the body out of the trunk without too much mangling, and carry him over toward the hole. Gasoline, salt, and Sam does the honors, standing over the corpse's head. He holds the lit match long enough to burn his fingers, just thinking or something, and then while the grave fills with flames he mutters, "One down, most of an army to go."

"Hard luck, Armando." Dean stands down at the feet and watches the skin crisp and fly away. That smell will always remind him of his dad. "We know it wasn't you did all that stuff."

Sam stuffs his hands in his pockets and comes to stand at Dean's side. "I guess it isn't a demon we'd met before, or it would have said something. It wasn't the one --" Sam purses his lips in that _we're not talking about it_ way "-- that you talked to, or you'd feel different. Right?"

"Or you'd drop dead," Dean mumbles to himself. Louder, "She has a good gig going, at crossroads. Wasn't her."

The flames die down while they watch, and all that dirt has to go back into the hole. Sam reaches for his shovel again and leans on it, like a satisfied farmer. "We could tell with Meg, after a while. When she stopped acting." He seems to realize what he's saying all of a sudden and slows, glancing at the guy who's had a full-on serious-business life-or-death conversation with her and never twigged to it.

But Dean can only laugh, rueful. He pushes more dirt over the burned body. "So what's her profile? Besides a smart mouth and fucking with the Winchesters? She used an altar in Chicago. She sent people flying at Bobby's house, both times. In that hotel room, she pistol-whipped me, even though she could have got the same result without touching me at all."

"God," Sam busts out, shocked into shallow laughter. "I just had this image of her and Dad. What kind of carnage they coulda done to each other."

"She won that fight," Dean reminds him. "I guess she had backup, though."

"Oh. Right." Sam pauses, maybe thinking over the guy Dean wasted, one shot to the temple at close range. One of two demons they're actually sure is dead, no takebacks, do not pass Go do not collect $200. "What I wouldn't give --"

"No reason to expect she didn't escape like the others. She's probably walking the earth right now." Sam gives him a startled look; more than startled, he stops with a shovelful of dirt in midair and stares. The head of the shovel wobbles and little clods fall while Sam is thinking this over. Finally he turns over the spade and gets back to work. They fill in that hole and tamp down the fresh, muddy dirt with their boots and replace the ragged tufts of grass as best they can. It's not mafia work, but it's a grave.

They're in the car, headed back toward the interstate, when Sam finally breaks the silence. "It's your turn. I've been possessed. It sucked."

"Yeah, I bet," Dean grinds out, and that is the last thing they say to one another till dawn.

***

They stop very late, someplace near the border between the Carolinas, and trudge through the dense night air toward their room while cicadas scream overhead. The weeds at the edge of the parking lot are hip-high, waist-high, untended. The air in the closed room is stifling.

Sam cranks the windows open and turns on the shower to cold while Dean tinkers with the AC unit. It's the cranky old kind, that runs all night at the same speed rather than kick in and out. It makes wheezing noises at first, but after a minute or two it evens up and the cool air begins to flow. Silence is their last defense against their irritation with each other, and they choose out beds by the simple virtue of Dean sitting down on one and Sam not arguing. After a little while in the growing cool they have the energy to kick off their shoes, and they salt the door and windowsills as always, without talking.

Predictably, Dean wakes up some time after two and is freezing cold, gooseflesh all up and down his limbs. He scrubs sleep out of his eyes and pulls up his underwear on his way to turn down the AC unit. His hand is on the knob before he realizes it is off all the way already. Sam must have done that, an hour or so gone; he's always been the sensitive one.

Dean pads his way back to his bed and sits on the edge of it, sleep-stupid. Sam is on his side, facing him, brows puckered as he dreams his way through their problems. He's got the sheet all the way up to his chin, wrinkling over his shoulder.

There's a body against Dean's back. It's that blooming heat of fever, or recent activity, even through a layer of clothing. More than one layer; there's a collar or something against his shoulder blades, and soft cotton in between. He lets her draw him back down onto the bed and mold herself to him and he feels her boots against his toes. She is fully dressed. They curl together on the sweaty sheets and she is getting some comfort from it because she doesn't let go. Dean reaches for her hands and never quite catches them.

There is no woman. He curls his fists under his chin, huddling against himself for warmth. There is no woman.

Cold round shapes press into his back, a row on one side of his spine, icy circles. The pressure on his skin is enough to leave marks, white bloodless button-shapes come morning, with little red holes where the thread goes. He closes his eyes and feels the chill in his sweat, and then he's asleep again and it turns to warmth, the sun bright on yellow hair and poppy-flower alike. If not for real morning, coming fast, he could dream that dream till he froze to death.

***

"Big freaking paperweight, is what," Dean concludes, while they're sitting at a highwayside picnic area in southern Georgia. They don't have a pretty red-checked tablecloth, but takeout fried chicken counts as a picnic if you eat it outside.

Sam asks, patient, "You tried the .38 rounds?" He wipes his greasy fingers on his jeans and picks up his beer. The morning crush of traffic crawls past, and clearly none of them have beer. They clink bottles to celebrate the exorcism they finished at four in the morning. No more damage than a couple of scorch marks on their knees, and no dead bodies this time. They deserve a happy hour, even though it's not noon yet anywhere on the continent.

"Tried every kind of round we got. I even poked around with rifle cartridges, just for comparison." Dean waves vaguely at the trunk, with its wax-pencil sigils protecting its cargo. "I think the cartridge radius is different -- those things were hand-packed, individually cast. The casings were thicker, so a modern casing that fits has too big a slug for the rifling. The closest fit was the .357s, but they rattle in the chamber."

Dean, for one, is not up for the experience of watching an antique weapon blow up in his hands. It's a nice piece, sandalwood on the grip, weighted so perfectly that it doesn't feel like a big heavy gun, but like an extension of your arm. Aiming that weapon feels like pointing a finger, like the most natural thing in the world. But without ammo that fits right in the barrel, aim isn't worth shit. Sam is having trouble appreciating this fact.

"But this is the only thing we've ever found that could actually _kill_ a demon. Really, permanently destroy it, no greatest hits reunion tour. How can this be the only thing?"

"Hey, I know," Dean grumps, "let's call up Sam Colt and ask him. A little necromancy's no big deal, right?"

Sam rounds on him, nearly knocking over his beer. "Don't you dare. Bad enough you've got --" This is the stuff they aren't talking about. He works his mouth, trying to find a way around it, and Dean really would rather that not talking about something meant _not talking about it_. Finally Sam relaxes and says, "One whammy at a time, dude. You bring in the dark arts, and I don't even want to know what would happen."

Dean throws a chicken bone at him. "What, you think I could cross the streams or something?"

"You might turn yourself into the Easter Bunny, at this rate."

They laugh together, a little bit hysterical from exhaustion. They let it go on for a while, wheezing, till they both stop at the same moment. Dean gestures again at the mystically-locked trunk. "Like I said, paperweight."

"No it's not," Sam ponders. "We thought that Colt made the weapon for a hunter, to kill things with. But even without bullets, it's still a key. He fashioned that key in just the perfect shape to make sure that a hunter would always want to keep ahold of it."

"Safest place for it, hands of a hunter."

"You know," Sam says bitterly, "I think the safest scenario is not making the door into Hell have a key at all."

"Details, details," Dean grumbles, and they drink up their beers.

***

When you have to cross Texas in July, in a black car, you do it by night. You fill a couple of spare gas cans in case there aren't any 24-hour service stations along the way, and you pull in someplace just before dawn, and you hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and you pray the drapes are heavy enough to keep out daylight and the pitiless, baking heat.

Dean wakes up shivering, in the early afternoon. He is on the floor with his arms over his knees. He is almost naked, just wrinkled underwear and he's lost his socks. The arm across his shoulders is wearing a jacket and it's not giving him any warmth. His teeth are chattering.

"Hm? What?" Sam asks, from above. He makes a noise in his throat and tries again, and this time he sounds awake: "Dean, where are you?"

"Got a fever," Dean forces out, a little shocked at the tremor in his voice. His toes and fingertips are white, the nails a grayish purple.

Sam scrambles around, untangling himself from his sweaty sheets. A huge hand comes down over Dean's forehead, tacky, warm, and the phantom next to him disappears as a real person takes its place. Sam feels his temperature and then pokes up under his jaw for his glands. "No you don't," he says, alarmed. He's sitting on the floor now too, only he's in sweatpants and long sleeves. It's Texas in July and the middle of the day, and he's been sleeping in long sleeves. He picks up one of Dean's hands and chafes it, and under his grip the skin blooms red again, a startling color. "Or if you do we both have it. What did you dream about?"

Dean is coming back to himself, can feel the heat radiating inward from outside. Dust motes dance in the tiny slit of sun between the edges of the curtains. "It's just some stupid ghost," he says, stubborn. "Just some stupid ghost."

"How'd it get across the salt-lines?" Sam asks. He twists to see, but the salt is still there, below the door.

"Don't know."

Of course, if it can't come in after they've shut the door, then it must have come in with them. "It's in the room right now," Sam quavers, after a little while. Involuntarily they look around, as if it might be visible, and catch each other at it. If he didn't feel like shit, Dean might laugh, but Sam is serious. "We can double-up on protections. I'll Sharpie a Devil's Trap on your forehead."

"Very funny," Dean mumbles, and shudders.

"I dreamed it was Jess's cold feet for a while, and then that it was ice, cubes or an ice sculpture, me in an ice-filled bathtub with the phone on my chest like in the story about getting your kidneys stolen." Sam wraps his arm around his brother's shoulder, where the ghost-arm was. Dean shrugs against the prison of it. He guesses what Sam hasn't said: a Jess made of ice, Jess served up on ice like lettuce in a salad bar, Jess as a naked gray corpse in a freezer. Hell of a way to dream about your girlfriend.

"I dream about a lot of girls," he chokes out. The blonde girl every night now, the red poppy and her yellow hair like wheat, how she's about to turn around and say hello, if only he didn't wake up too soon.

Sam pulls his arm out of the way and sits still, not pushy, just there and radiating body heat. Dean watches the hairs on his forearm relax, bit by bit, and forget how cold it was just a moment ago.

"So these girls." A knock on the shoulder. "Any of 'em wind up dead afterwards --?"

"Whoa whoa whoa," and Dean's up on his feet, pacing in the dim, small space. "If you start in again about being responsible for Jess's death --"

"I'm not." Sam plucks at his own sleeve and after a moment he pulls the sopping shirt off over his head. He lets it flop on the floor. "Like you said, it's some ghost. It's not Jess, 'cause she hardly even knew you. So --"

"I don't fucking know," Dean bites out, and slams his way into the bathroom for a shower. It's after noon, and it's not like they're going to get any more sleep at this point anyway. He wrenches on the shower and stands under its shocking needle-spray.

***

It's been four months. They've corralled exactly five demons, including the one they trapped but can't figure out how to send back to Hell. (It's in a blessed mason jar in Huntsville, Alabama, hidden in an earthen-walled basement behind a row of canned peaches.) Plus Jo's three, plus one other Bobby knows about, thanks to an incredibly lucky Lutheran deacon with delusions of grandeur and a jones for classic horror movies. It's not enough, not in four months. Not with eight months to go.

They don't take days off any more. Sam is driving them through heavy rain while Dean fusses with their notes. He'll never get everything down, not if he had a million years to write, and anyway Sam knows all this stuff already. The words are blurry on the page, dancing around in circles like _they're_ possessed.

"So what kills a demon?" Dean asks, more to realize it's a question needs asking than because he thinks Sam has the answer. "I mean, sending them back to hell, it's kind of like being a dogcatcher, you know?"

"Oh my god," laughs Sam, one hand easy on the steering wheel. "Dean Winchester, Existential Dogcatcher."

The rain thunders down above their heads and Dean feels a little like he has to shout. A year ago, he would have demanded the right to drive, as bad as visibility is right now, but Sam's doing okay. "Seriously, dude. We know they can weasel out again, some of them anyway, without even anybody to prop the door open."

"I don't know." While he thinks it over, Sam plucks another napkin from the pile and wipes condensation off the inside of the windshield again. His freak long arms turn up useful in the weirdest places. "We know they don't like wrought iron. Holy fire? Virgin sacrifice?"

Dean chuckles. "I'm gonna take a wild stab and say that virgin sacrifice is a bad-guy strategy."

"Well, what did Colt use? Some combination of silver and lead, bronze in the casings --"

"You got Bobby working on that already?"

Sam tenses, and his eyes slide sideways. "I can't tell you what I've got Bobby researching for me."

"Oh. That." They sit next to each other as Sam navigates among the soggy pines. Dean can't remember what state he's in, just that it's one of the states where it rains during the summer. "Well don't go saving it all up for the end, you know? If he finds something, we should be using it."

This time Sam's stare is pinched, haughty. It's long enough that Dean is about to put his hand on the steering wheel when Sam looks away. "I'd pass up the chance to waste more than a couple demons to get at the one that's screwing you," he chides.

"I'm just saying," Dean tries again, "whatever tools we can find. Pagan gods, reanimated ancestors, those freaky mystical pyramids -- you know, I'd pay good money to find out who'd win a demon-werewolf grudgematch."

"I'm not arguing about this with you," Sam says, hard.

Dean gives up, and drops the topic. They drive on through the rain.

***

They're lying in their beds, side by side like always, and dawn is already graying the sky in the east. The dull rumble of trucks on the highway is annoyingly inconstant. Dean is listening carefully for his brother's breathing, that little hitch he gives when he falls out of muttering dream and back into the deepest part of sleep. Since they discovered tempera paint washes off in the morning, they've marked themselves every night with sigils. Getting a good night's sleep has made a world of difference, and they're not snapping at each other nearly as often.

Dean has been listening to Sam breathe for at least an hour, and thinking for a while longer than that. So it's with full deliberation that he licks his thumb and smears the edges of the circle, near the top, at the notch at the base of his neck. He lifts his hand and the cold is there at once, the weight of a head on his shoulder. A hand on his flank, flat against his belly. Not touching the sign.

"Hey Meg," says Dean, not loud.

In the other bed, Sam makes a startled snort, and rolls over. Dean stares at the ceiling till he's settled.

"I know you're here, Meg." This time it's a whisper.

Dean doesn't look for the woman who is lifting his arm, moving it so that she fits in the crook of his elbow. Her jacket makes noises, the squinch of good leather as she moves. The hard edges of buttons on his ribs. It was a red jacket, he remembers suddenly. A red leather jacket with buttons.

"I can't get warm," comes the sibilant whisper in his ear.

He screws his eyes shut and wraps his arm around her. "Course you can't. You're a ghost." Her short hair falls on his skin, and he wonders whether it was the demon that cut it like that. She looked much better with long hair, yellow in the sun like wheat.

She says again, "I can't get warm." She shivers, and transmits the shiver to him.

"I asked Bobby to check. Your parents cremated you a year ago. There's no bones even left to burn."

"It's a dream," she moans, and tucks her face closer into his neck. "I'm dreaming."

"I wondered why it started in April, when you'd already been dead for so long, but I just wasn't paying attention. You've been in Bobby's house that whole time, haven't you? Just you and him, reading up on Hell." Dean feels the pebbling of his skin as his body temperature drops. He tries to remember the necklaces she wore, and can't -- just the fact she wore some. "Waiting for your chance at revenge."

"All those awful things. I don't know how he stands it."

"Bobby? He can stand a lot of things." His chin is at her temple. He could whisper into her ear, about how Bobby broke down when he guessed about the deal, and Sam would never know. Meg is shuddering, breath coming hard. "Demon's got a lot to answer for."

Dean's good at this, at soldiering through the good cry or the morning-after regrets. He knows the right soothing tones and the kind hand on the waist. Meg sobs a couple of times while he stares at the ceiling, and then she sniffles once and firms up. "Oh. You're next."

"I -- what?" Dean almost twists to look at her. He remembers in time and keeps his face averted, a prickle behind his eyeballs as he turns to Sam instead. That big rangy body is curled up small, both hands tucked between his knees. "Yeah, I guess. You gonna be around, when it's my turn?"

"You were there," breathes Meg, full of dread. "You were there when I died. The rage in your face." He can feel her pulling away, trying to sit up. He grasps after her, catches her elbow and loses it again. She seems to be disappearing under his touch.

"Wait," he blurts. "We kicked that thing out, sent it back to Hell. It -- I'm sorry I called you names."

A hard grip on him, fingers wrapped around his wrist hard enough to leave bruises. He can feel the tension in her as if she were alive. Meg kicks a little, the fabric of her jeans abrading his knees. "Sorry," she apes, through tears. He didn't even know ghosts could be sarcastic.

"Yeah, I'm sorry," he grumps. "And you know who's not sorry? Freaking demons, is who."

"I'm so cold. Do you think Hell will be warm?" She clasps him close, trembling. The way their bodies overlap in the narrow bed, the cold space of her and the fabric of her clothing against his bare skin, and he can't help but pick up the shakes from her. They press each other close, and neither of them can get warm.

"Maybe we shouldn't have burned Armando's body. If you put together all the ghosts of all the people demons have killed over the years --" He clenches his jaw to make sure his teeth don't chatter. Angry as ghosts get, and _man_ they get angry, they've never gotten organized about it. Not that anybody's ever heard of.

"Revenge," she sighs, like a northerly wind. Dean feels that dissipation as if her own breath were blowing her away, and turns his face to see her at last. But he's too late, and she's already gone. There is no woman by his side. His arms are around nothing and the room is ordinary, warm. It bothers him that he can't remember what color her eyes are without the demon taint behind them. In his dream, her eyes are always closed.

He kicks off the sheets and wanders the room, chafing his arms a little as he comes back to wakefulness. He peeks out the window, toward the highway. Trucks drive into the pearly dawn, eighty miles an hour on the flat, as fast as they can go before the world wakes up and gets in their way. The sun will rise in only a few minutes. Dean turns away.

In the other bed, Sam is on his side, eyes open. He's still got his hands tucked between his knees and he looks like a little kid, like the biggest little kid on the planet. He points with his chin at the empty space in Dean's bed, that weird impression on the fitted sheet of two bodies, side by side. Dean pokes around in his things for clean underwear, so his back is turned when Sam asks, "How long have you been talking with her?"

Dean answers with another question. "We never met her, did we? Till that minute, right at the end. It was always the demon, wasn't it?" He wants to ask Sam what color her eyes are, and doesn't.

"Yeah, probably." The slither of starchy sheets, as Sam sits up. "Hey, don't talk with her about the revenge thing any more, okay? I'll do that. We don't know what might constitute attempted weaseling."

"A what?" Dean asks, baffled.

Sam gives him a funny look. More than funny, it's the kind of look you give a kid that's figured out a secret you didn't expect him ever to know. Dean's usually not on the receiving end of that look so much as the other end. "I can't talk about it," Sam says, lips twitching. "Not with you."

"Oh." Dean sniffs at his t-shirt, and decides it can bear another day. They're going to need a laundromat soon, though. Maybe the next state over, when they're done with the next demon. There's always more work to do. Sam is still looking at him funny. "What?"

"Nothing." Sam chuckles and runs his hand through his hair, makes it even more a mess than it already is. He stands up and stretches, taking up all the space. He cocks his head, the way dogs do when they're hearing a whistle too high for human ears. "You think she's been listening in on my phone calls to Bobby?"

"I think she's been too busy watching me when I'm in the shower," Dean tells him, and plasters a great big grin on his face. Sam busts out laughing.

"You're a pervert." Sam claims the bathroom, while Dean turns out his pockets onto the windowsill, counting change for their morning coffee.

"That's not news," Dean tells the walls, and any ghosts that might be listening in.


End file.
